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Not to be outdone by the state security apparatus' sudden commitment to telling us every bad thing we ever suspected them of doing, revealed elements of its plan for the Xbox One's online, Kinect and licensing structure on Thursday, in three posts to Xbox Wire, the Xbox news service. The three updates genuinely deserve further reading, and can be found at these locations:

It would be remiss not to note that this announcement regarding privacy by design surfaced at about the same time as the allegation in The Guardian that Microsoft has been sharing its users' content with the NSA since 2007, with or without its knowledge. This is going to be an interesting week for Microsoft, certainly.

The big questions

The releases, shared through the blog of Xbox Live's Major Nelson, provide information regarding three areas of gamer anxiety - whether the Xbox One will allow the resale of games, when the Kinect camera will be monitoring its users and whether an online connection will be required to play Xbox games. However, the answers leave certain questions unanswered, and raise others. The answers to two of these key questions are relatively unsurprising, albeit perhaps unwelcome - the console will need to be connected to the Internet to verify that the content being played is licensed at least once every 24 hours, and the Kinect can be turned off in the sense of not responding to any command except "On" - which is not quite the same as being wholly off - or set not to recognise even that voice command. However the last - and for many most important - of these questions is still short of clarification - that of the Xbox One's relationship to preowned and resold games.

Resale and rewrapping

One of the recurring questions around Microsoft's new console has been whether further countermeasures will be taken against the used game market. The bane of many publishers, the resale market has however acted as a useful control on pricing, and a way to continue sales of DRM and virtual goods.

Microsoft's elucidation of this question may raise as many questions as it answers, but the key phrase is:

We designed Xbox One so game publishers can enable you

This phrase, or variations of it, recurs repeatedly in the document. What it means, of course, is that the Xbox One is designed so that games publishers can prevent consumers from doing something, by the act of not enabling it. To wit:

We designed Xbox One so game publishers can enable you to trade in your games at participating retailers.

The corollary is that game publishers will be able to prevent their games being traded in, if they so desire, by locking the game to a specific Xbox login - a conclusion supported by the later statement:

In our role as a game publisher, Microsoft Studios will enable you to give your games to friends or trade in your Xbox One games at participating retailers. Third party publishers may opt in or out of supporting game resale and may set up business terms or transfer fees with retailers.

So, publishers can decided whether or not their games can be resold. This is significant. And only "participating retailers" will be able to resell Xbox One discs - presumably because they will need access to a Microsoft system to reset the connection between the disc and the account of its former owner.

The question of whether games can be handed over to friends is also addressed:

Xbox One is designed so game publishers can enable you to give your disc-based games to your friends. There are no fees charged as part of these transfers. There are two requirements: you can only give them to people who have been on your friends list for at least 30 days and each game can only be given once.

This is interesting - the "enable" once again suggests that publishers may be able to prevent game gifting at their discretion, but the later text seems to suggest that the rules on gifting are the same for all games.

Causing further confusion is the question of whether this means that games can only be gifted once in their lifetime, or if they can be gifted once by each owner - that is, I can gift a game to you, and you can then gift a game to your friend, and so on, but nobody can gift the same purchase twice.

Edelman, Microsoft's PR agency, were unable to share any further information, although they look forward to being able to do so in the months ahead. However, it seems from the phrasing that the former interpretation is more likely - otherwise the logical phrasing would be "you cannot gift the same purchase twice". This is not wholly out of whack with other gifting systems - Steam, for example , is more restrictive, allowing games to be gifted only before they are played. However, games on Steam are often massively less expensive than games for consoles. Furthermore, the text then adds:

In addition, third party publishers can enable you to give games to friends.

This suggests strongly that third party publishers will be able to "turn off" gifting in their games. And this in turn suggests a considerable shift in the balance of power between purchaser and publisher.

This represents a significant shift in the balance of power between purchaser and publisher. Theoretically, the law of the market will reveal how comfortable gamers are with publishers disabling resale or gifting on the games they have purchased. It is even possible that no publisher will take advantage of this capability.